My set-up. Please read and feel free to make comments/suggestions.

I'm new to the board so I wanted to tell everyone a little about myself.

I started playing when I was 9. Don't wanna give away my exact age but I've been playing for over 20 years. I started out on bass because I was interested in all the funky bass parts that were going on at the time on pop radio. I learned scales and reading, etc... I hated practicing. I started playing drums and guitar. Combined all the elements and started writing. I enjoyed writing and playing in bands more than practicing. I was driving my teacher nuts with all the funk stuff and he played "The Lemon Song" by Led Zeppelin for me and it was then that I realized there could be interesting bass parts in the rock world as well. I was pretty naive at the time. When I was 18, I went off to college and started playing in the University Jazz Band. I played Jazz for two years and majored in Music and learned more in those two years than I had ever learned before.

I got in contact with an old high school buddy and we attempted to put together a (what at the time would have been called) prog band. We were writing original music that sounded like Rush, King Crimson, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, etc... We wanted to basically be a more heavy metal version of Rush. This was from 1981-1983. We never found a singer and went through several guitar players before we finally gave up. Then came along the Glam Rock crap. I tried to be in a band for a couple of years but finally got turned off of the scene and stopped playing completely for several years.

I sold all my equipment because I hated what was happening to the radio. I wasn't good enough to be a phenomenal and in-demand bass player. In retrospect, I should have practiced my ass off and tried to become a better player. But I never had the patience.

Then in 1991, along came a band called Dream Theater. They did everything that I wanted to do back in the '80's. A buddy of mine kept telling me to get back into music, especially because of the internet. So I did. And we recorded a CD in 1998 and are currently working on our 2nd CD which features ex-Dream Theater, ex-Alice Cooper, ex-Kiss, and current Planet X keyboardist, Derek Sherinian.